The Case For Web Performance Monitoring and Optimization

Combining monitoring and optimization can help maximize a company’s web performance investment. Rigor’s complete set of tools helps you easily ensure that your site is performing the way it should to engage users, drive conversions, and produce value for both you and your clients. Here’s why monitoring andoptimization is so valuable to web performance.

Getting Set Up With Monitoring

The first step to improving web performance is to implement the appropriate monitoring infrastructure. Not only do you need to know your current and historic traffic levels, uptime, response times, and server availability, you will need to be able to leverage this data to predict future resource usage and response times.

Benchmarks Make Quantification Possible

Rigor Monitoring helps you track your site’s performance over time.

Before implementing any performance-related modifications and enhancements, we recommend getting a current picture of your site’s performance with your existing settings, configuration, traffic levels, and so on. Having the appropriate benchmark numbers can help you quantify the impact changes have on your site.

Be Proactive Instead of Reactive

Proactive monitoring ensures that you are ready for any hiccups that might occur. You certainly want to know if there’s downtime for any reason, but what if you were able to see a possible server overload due to a spike in traffic? How would your strategy change if you knew ahead of time that your server is running low on a critical resource?

With this type of data on hand, you can implement preventative measures to ensure that your site stays up and performant. By doing so, not only can you reduce the costs associated with downtime, but you can also keep your conversion rate high and scale the resources you have on hand to serve your site as necessary. You don’t risk utilizing too many resources for low levels of traffic, and you don’t underestimate the need for resources when there’s a traffic surge.

Most importantly, you can reduce your reliance on external factors to maintain uptime. With the availability of apps and tools with which you can integrate, numerous packages are available that allow you to extend your functionality or offer additional features without requiring too much additional development time. However, the downside of using third-party resources is that your uptime is at the mercy of things that are outside of your control. You can mitigate this risk with proactive monitoring–that lets you know as soon as there’s a problem, so you can make the appropriate changes to keep your site operational, even if a break in the dependency chain occurs.

Keep Up with Your Competitors

By benchmarking your site against industry leaders, you can see how you stack up against others when it comes to key performance indicators (KPIs) such as render and load times, page size, and the number of resources loaded. Speed matters, so you should ensure that you are competitive among peers when attracting visitors and potential customers. To do that, you need to measure your own KPIs as well as those of your competitors. Rigor’s Benchmarking makes this easier than ever.

Leveraging Monitoring Data for Optimization

By thoroughly implementing monitoring, you will gather an abundance of data and valuable insight into how your site is performing. The biggest gains, however are delivered when you act upon this data.

Knowing How to Respond

Have you ever spent hours troubleshooting an issue, only to come across a crucial bit of information that, had you known earlier, would’ve reduced the amount of time you spent on the problem? This is a common issue and one that Rigor attempts to reduce or even eliminate.

Rigor’s easy-to-use optimization product helps teams identify issues, implement the optimal solution, and get back online as soon as possible. Fixing problems in production and downtime is expensive. Why not get ahead of any defects ahead of time?

Automating Performance Fixes

By leveraging Rigor’s optimization expertise, you can compare your site against hundreds of custom-curated performance rules. This allows you to improve your performance through both identifying defects and also outlining exactly what needs to be done to correct these issues. Rigor can automates these identification tasks, which were once the exclusive domain of a production engineer, so teams can deploy updates in development, test, and production environments with greater speed and accuracy.

Delegating Tasks

Once you know what needs to be done to improve your site, Rigor helps you prioritize these tasks by ranking defects by effort and severity. This allows you to get started right away and prioritize areas that help you garner the biggest gains.

Furthermore, you can automatically assign tasks based on department and job role. For issues that need to be fixed right away, Rigor helps keep track of these tasks so nothing gets lost in the cloud of potential to-dos. Lower priority items that will garner smaller wins (but wins nonetheless) can easily be triaged and assigned for a later date.

Takeaways

Monitoring your site for performance is crucial, and implementing a complete monitoring system as soon as possible is important. Not only does this give you crucial information on your site’s performance, but it also alerts you to potential performance hangups. Based on this information, you can be proactive, not reactive, minimizing any adverse impact on your site.

However, monitoring is just the first step. With the data you’ve collected, it’s important to take the next step and implement optimization. Knowing there are issues with your site and then not fixing them is just foolish in a market where margins are slim and competition is fierce.

For customized information on how Rigor can help you implement the right monitoring system, identify defects, and optimize your website, contact Rigor today.

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